The first NHS community trust signs up to Alcidion’s flow technology, following impact seen in acute hospitals around improved bed visibility for staff and timely care and

discharge for patients.

Community hospitals across Worcestershire are to streamline patient journeys, ensure timely care and discharge, and more easily and efficiently manage beds across multiple sites. This follows a new agreement between Herefordshire and Worcestershire Health and Care NHS Trust and smart health technology provider Alcidion.

The healthcare organisation is the first NHS community trust in the UK to procure Miya Flow, a system that will provide staff with interactive electronic dashboards to help manage the flow of patients and clients, who are geographically dispersed across six community hospitals in Worcestershire.

Staff will use journey boards in Miya Flow to manage bed capacity, with early visibility of patients who require beds, as well as clinically contextual information and the reasons patients are being admitted.

Care teams will also be able to easily visualise where patients are in the organisation, and the care and support required to help enable efficient discharge pathways and prevent unnecessarily long stays in hospitals.

Lisa Yates, deputy chief information officer, Herefordshire and Worcestershire Health and Care NHS Trust, said: “Introducing Miya Flow will make a big difference to our healthcare professionals in delivering care and enabling effective discharge pathways. It will provide ward staff, bed managers, and specialist clinical teams with information at a glance to help them get patients to the right place in their care journey without delay.

“Rather than recording information on isolated systems, logging in and out of different screens, and spending time phoning wards at different times of the day to understand bed capacity, our staff will have all the information they need at a glance to find the right beds for patients quickly. Healthcare teams will also be able to see more easily which patients need their attention and will be able to plan their time and resources more efficiently.”  

The trust, which is one of England’s mental health global digital exemplars, provides a range of physical and mental health services to patients across Herefordshire and Worcestershire, from its community hospitals, mental health recovery units and within patients’ homes.

Miya Flow will be configured by the trust to provide staff with information specific to their role. This might include dashboards that provide live organisation wide insights, or that focus on specific hospital or settings. And it will also allow specialities, for example, pharmacy or occupational therapy, to review which patients require their support, and what they need to do for those individuals.

The solution will also integrate with existing systems to allow staff to seamlessly view more information when they need it, and to avoid the need to spend time manually entering data.

The system will be deployed across the trusts’ multiple sites in its network.

Lynette Ousby, UK managing director at Alcidion, said: “Transferring our NHS experience in flow to help busy healthcare professionals in community hospitals throughout Worcestershire is an exciting opportunity. This is all about making the right thing do the easiest thing to do for people who need information at a glance. I look forward to seeing clinical benefits materialise quickly as wards and clinical teams put our technology into practice, and gain easy access to information they need to deliver care as efficiently and effectively as possible for patients.”

Alcidion currently provides flow technology to multiple acute NHS hospitals in different parts of the country, where it is alleviating pressure on busy staff as they deal with the growing elective backlog, and where it is helping to ensure patients are treated efficiently.

Kate Quirke, CEO for Alcidion, added: “Herefordshire and Worcestershire Health and Care NHS Trust has a strong reputation as a digital exemplar. We have seen that the trust has a real appetite for technology that can make the lives of healthcare professionals easier. That resonates strongly with Alcidion. As the NHS continues to deploy technology at pace, its important to continue to listen to what clinical teams need. We look forward to having more of those conversations with people delivering care as we deploy Miya Flow to the trust’s hospitals.”